6 Reasons to Use Parental Controls

The world children are being raised in is nothing like their parents grew up in. These days, it is not out of place to see a toddler with a tablet of their own – or a growing kid who knows more about the internet than even their parents.

While it is very possible that a child uses the internet without running into any of the common problems – being stalked by a predator, online harassment, inappropriate contacts, etc. – that is not a chance you, as a parent, should take.

If you have been considering installing parental control measures, here are six talking points to support that consideration.

1 Monitoring Devices

When your kids were learning to walk, you were usually there to hold their hands. The same is true for when they start learning to walk the internet streets.

There are a series of parental control options on different app stores for better monitoring of your child’s devices even when you are not there. The best part of these apps is that they let you set triggers for certain problem words (such as ‘sex, nude, drugs’ or what have you) so you’ll know when your child receives any messages with such content.

As a parent, we recommend letting your kids know that you are monitoring their conversations, but not necessarily reading every line of text they send/ gets sent to them. Besides the fact that this builds trust and allows your kids know you are just looking out for them, it makes sense because you’ll need their account information (email login, account passwords, etc.) to effectively monitor them.

2 Time Management

Kids are growing up with a lot of screens these days, and that is affecting them in more ways than one. If something is not done about it soon, this could become a bigger problem in the future. Thus, it is important to help regulate how much time your child is spending on their devices.

For this, parents can institute a rule that mandates children to do other activities after spending a certain time online. To do so remotely, parental control apps like the Google Family Link comes in handy.

The Google Family app helps record how long children are spending on their units and impose limits on them as you have set it. The best part is that you can program the app to enforce compulsory bedtimes, such that the child is not allowed to use their device past a certain time at night.

3 Malware Protection

Even after having the internet safety talk with your kids, there is a high chance one of them will be the cause of inviting malware into the home computer network. Afterall, they are not experienced in what to look out for and will most likely keep clicking through a page with malicious content till it does harm to that computer.

Fortunately, you can filter out websites and platforms with poor content on parental control apps. That ensures your kids doesn’t get access to such platforms at all, talkless of being able to interact with it enough that it causes serious harm.

4 Manage Cyberbullying

While we are still trying to deal with bullying in the physical society, these unscrupulous individuals have made their way onto the internet too – and it’s not pretty there either. These cyberbullies will set out to make people feel bad about themselves with the kinds of comments and messages they send – and there is no telling where that could lead.

With parental control apps in the mix, you get to see what is happening in real time. That gives you the opportunity to talk things over with your kid, giving them the effective tools to manage and handle the situation better.

5 Police Games

While parental control is usually seen as something you use on only internet platforms and smartphones, it goes beyond that. With the rate at which kids today are drawn to gaming, it becomes important to have some kind of policing done in this section too.

Games have now been made more interactive in their inclusion of chat systems, in-house purchase capabilities and internet-surfing options too.

All of these are great, but they could expose your kids to inappropriate content anyways. Likewise, you want to make sure your kid doesn’t go on a spending spree with the credit card attached to their gaming accounts.

Fortunately, all that can be done from the parental controls tab of such a gaming platform. With these controls, you should set up user profiles which will allow your kids access only certain features of the game which you see fit.

6 Location Tracking

Perhaps the most important application of parental control technology is in knowing the whereabouts of your kids at any time – as long as their devices are kept on them. This is especially important in cases of emergencies, as well as knowing your kids are safe at all times.

While setting up location tracking, ensure you talk to your kids about how important their location data is. This means not sharing their location on social media nor with anyone else besides family.

Wrap Up

Using parental control apps hold more promise than not for both parents and their kids alike. If you haven’t already started using them, now might be a great time.